Tower and Cell, Signifying Much More Than a Prison

Relics From Angola Are to Tell Black History at New Museum

To some people, the name of Angola, the Louisiana State Penitentiary, brings to mind the country’s oldest prison rodeo, which draws thousands of tourists while raising money for charity. Others think of it as a repository for fearsome criminals — murderers, rapists and kidnappers — who have earned their average sentence of 93 years. Many remember it as having once been one of the most brutal and corrupt institutions in the post-Civil War South, the nearest kin to slavery that could legally exist.

All of these associations and more will compete when an old guard tower and a cell from the prison are installed in the forthcoming National African American Museum for History and Culture in Washington, a place with the complex mission of presenting an official narrative of black life in America.

Paul Gardullo, a curator for the museum who negotiated with officials at Angola, said it was looking for items to illustrate the dehumanizing incarceration of blacks in the 20th century and that practice’s link to slavery. “We wanted to tell a story of Angola as a place that still carries the legacy of slavery with it,” he said. “It is a powerful story and a story that our museum needs to be sharing with the public.”

In a museum charged with the dual tasks of recounting the oppression of blacks in America and celebrating their accomplishments, however, the opportunities for clashing interpretations are manifold. Museum officials, for instance, were initially uncertain whether to accept the handcuffs that a police officer in Cambridge, Mass., used when he arrested the African-American Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., in 2009, outside Mr. Gates’s home. The manacles are now part of the collection, though the museum director, Lonnie Bunch, said he was not sure if they would be displayed.

“I imagine there will be many, many flash points,” he added. Mr. Kennedy speculated about the museum’s possible treatment of Elijah Muhammad, the longtime leader of the Nation of Islam, who died in 1975. “He called white people ‘devils,’ “ Mr. Kennedy said. “Will he show up? I bet he will, and I bet he’ll be treated pretty respectfully too. You could have a really nice fight about that.”

Controversy, though, is fine, said Leslie Harris, an associate professor of history at Emory University in Atlanta: “The role of museums is to challenge us and provoke us a bit.”

Ms. Harris, Mr. Kennedy and other scholars agreed that the reaction to provocative museum acquisitions like the guard tower depend wholly on the explanation and context provided by curators — something the public will not be able to view until the museum opens in 2015.

“The museum will tell the American story through the African-American lens,” Mr. Bunch said in response to both professors’ comments. “It’s a story that’s full of controversy, and we’re not going to shy away from that. What’s important to me is to collect artifacts that tell the full story.” He added that the distinguished African-American historian John Hope Franklin had always told him, “If you tell the unvarnished truth, people will be changed.”

Work on the Angola project has started. On Tuesday contractors are scheduled to begin dismantling the Depression-era concrete tower, said Cathy Fontenot, chief of public affairs at Angola. It is in a section of the 18,000-acre prison known as Camp H — as in “Camp Happy,” Ms. Fontenot said — that was closed in 1991 by fire marshals. The area has since been used as a movie location, a training ground for firefighters and a military testing area for bombs.

Photo

This 21-foot-tall guard tower from Angola penitentiary in Louisiana will be installed in the forthcoming National African American Museum for History and Culture in Washington.Credit
National Museum of African American History and Culture

The surveillance tower will be installed as part of an exhibition on segregation. Spencer Crew, a historian at George Mason University and a guest curator, called it a symbol of “attempts to control the African-American community.”

The 6-by-9-foot cell will be moved later and installed in a different area of the museum, one devoted to places. Part of Camp A (the oldest section of the prison), the cell was constructed in the 1970s on top of the old slave quarters that had previously been used to house black inmates. This tiny dot of space contains a long stretch of the African-American story, Mr. Gardullo said.

It is an example of how deeply the history of blacks in America and Angola runs. Originally a slave plantation on the banks of the Mississippi River, Angola grew into a brutal, privately owned prison that leased out convicts as forced laborers after the Civil War. The state took over the operation in 1901, not with an eye to reform, but to reaping big profits, said Burk Foster, a former professor of criminal justice who has written a history of Angola.

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“It established the foundational principles for how you manage convicts,” he said, “to get the most work from them with the least possible investment of public funds.”

Cruel and squalid, Angola often inflicted worse suffering than was endured by slaves, historians say. In the 1960s, because of its violence, it was widely known as the bloodiest prison in the South.

Today about three-quarters of its more than 5,000 prisoners are black; only about 200 inmates are likely to ever be released. But the prison, led by Burl Cain, its warden, is at pains to show how much it has changed.

Mr. Cain is credited with eliminating much of the violence, creating educational programs, giving some inmates the opportunity to live in dorms or group houses, and emphasizing what he calls “moral rehabilitation” through Bible studies. He has also confronted Angola’s gruesome past and established a prison museum in 1998, right outside the gates, saying, “This is to remind us of the past that we don’t want to go back to.”

Mr. Gardullo, the curator for the Washington museum, said he was impressed not only with prison officials’ willingness to create an on-site museum, but also their willingness to turn over the tower and cell “for us to portray a history that gets into some of these dark corners of American history.”

Still, exhibitions on Angola at an African-American museum on the National Mall will undoubtedly be linked to contentious contemporary debates about whether the prison system functions as a new form of Jim Crow; why blacks continue to be enmeshed in the criminal justice network at a rate disproportionate to their numbers in the general population; even conditions at the prison today.

(Death row inmates at the penitentiary recently filed a lawsuit in federal court charging that the heat index — a combination of temperature and humidity — can reach as high as 195 degrees Fahrenheit, and some human rights groups have criticized Angola for locking prisoners in solitary confinement for more than 40 years.)

Bert Dixon, a retired corrections officer who now works at the Angola museum, said it has received positive feedback from people who make the trip down Louisiana Highway 66 to view it.

Like a number of the prison’s 1,400 employees, he was born on the grounds (where many staff members also live), one of four generations in his family who have worked at Angola. Asked how he thought visitors to the African-American museum might react to the tower, Mr. Dixon responded: “They’ll make comments, some good, some bad. Mostly bad.

“It’s all part of history,” he added. “You can’t get around it.”

A version of this article appears in print on July 9, 2013, on Page C1 of the New York edition with the headline: Tower and Cell, Signifying Much More Than a Prison. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe